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JOSIAH QUINCY, 

THE GREAT MAYOR. 

B Y • 

MELLEN CHAMBERLAIN. 




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JOSIAH OUINCY, 



THE GREAT MAYOR. 



An Address delivered before the Massachusetts Society for 

Promoting Good Citizenship, at the Old South 

Meeting-House, Boston, Feb. 25, 1889, 



MELLEN CHAMBERLAIN. 



boston : 

Published by the Society. 

1889. 



.6 



BEACON PRESS : 
THOMAS TODD, PRINTER, 

I SOMERSET ST., BOSTON. 



lu Gixciiangft 
MAT 2 9 19-1 



Josiah Quincy, the Great Mayor. 



In front of the City Hall are two statues in bronze — one of 
Benjamin Franklin, and the other of Josiah Quincy. The artist 
has represented Franklin in his old age and the culminated 
splendor of his fame, revisiting, as he had often expressed a desire 
to do, the city of his birth, and standing in reverential attitude, 
with uncovered head, before the spot hallowed by memories of the 
old Boston Latin School, in which he received the rudiments of his 
education. No better site could have been chosen. With equal 
felicity of position Josiah Quincy, in the prime of manhood, stands 
on the opposite side of the inclosure, before the most august sym- 
bol of the city which he had done so much to build up and adorn. 
As works of art these statues provoked the vituperative eloquence 
of Boston's most gifted orator, and I hear that they divide the 
opinions of experts. However this may be, the characters they 
commemorate gain in respect with the passing years and the 
spread of letters. 

In some circumstances of their lives Benjamin Franklin and 
Josiah Quincy resembled each other ; in others, they were strongly 
contrasted. Natives of the same town, each represented the class 
from which he sprung, and each had no inconsiderable influence in 
shaping the institutions of Philadelphia and of Boston, in which 
they severally resided. Franklin was of the people, without 
fortune, or interest, or social position; but by self-culture and 
industrious use of his powers and opportunities, he became dis- 
tinguished at home and abroad, and here, if nowhere else, is known 
as " the Great Bostonian." Josiah Quincy, on the other hand, was 
of "good family" — a phrase which denoted the highest distinc- 
tion of rank accorded in the Boston of those days. His fortune, 
"counseling ignoble ease and peaceful sloth," was ample; but 



closing his ears to the sirens, he bound himself to laborious days, 
and, having acquired reputation in national affairs, so successfully 
promoted the development of municipal institutions in this city 
that he is now best known as " the Great Mayor." 

The life of Franklin, often written, has been read in many 
lands, and thousands, following his precepts and example, have 
lived successful lives. Josiah Ouincy's life by his son, a model of 
literary skill and, as a filial biography, unsurpassed if ever equaled, 
is less known than it ought to be ; for in the field of civic affairs, 
everywhere now assuming importance, I know of no more instruct- 
ive or exemplary life ever lived in America. That phase of it — 
its instructive and exemplary quality — is my theme this evening. 

He was born here in Boston, on the easterly side of Wash- 
ington Street, a few doors southerly from Milk Street, February 4, 
1772, was graduated at Harvard College in 1790, admitted to the 
bar in 1793, and married in 1797. In May, 1804, he was elected 
to the State Senate, and in October of the same year, at the age 
of thirty-three, a Representative to Congress, where he sat until 
March 4, 181 3. Declining further service in that body, with the 
exception of several terms in the General Court and the session 
of the Constitutional Convention of 1820, he was in private life, 
giving much attention to the cultivation of his ancestral acres at 
Quincy, until his appointment in 1821 as Judge of the Municipal 
Court of Boston, over which he presided for two years. From 
May, 1823, to January, 1829, he was Mayor of Boston. Failing of 
reelection, he was chosen President of Harvard College in 1829, 
and held that office for sixteen years, residing at Cambridge. 
After his resignation of the presidency in 1845, ^^ returned to 
Boston, resuming his summer residence at Quincy, and there, in 
his house overlooking the sea, he died, July i, 1864, at the great 
age of ninety-two years, four months, and twenty-seven days. 

Few of our public men have lived so long or through so many 
extraordinary events. His life began little less than a year before 
Samuel Adams, in Faneuil Hall, reported the " Rights of the Col- 
onists," in one of the most important State papers of the Revolu- 
tionary period ; and it ended little less than a year before Lee 
surrendered his army at Appomattox Court House. At the first 
period the Revolution, which severed an empire and made thirteen 



5 

subject colonies independent States, had become inevitable ; at the 
second, the last slave shackle in Anglo-Saxon lands had been 
broken, and the decree of God was on the wing which reunited 
the great Republic as one, free and inseparable. What moment- 
ous events intervened ! The first shot at Lexington and the bloody 
carnage at Bunker Hill ; the Declaration of Independence and 
Cornwallis's surrender at Yorktown ; the Treaty of Peace, in 1783, 
and the framing of the Constitution of the United States, in 
1787; the acquisition of Louisiana, including territory west of 
the Mississippi, more than doubling the area of the Republic ; 
and the War of 18 12, which first aroused the spirit of nationality 
in the people, and on the sea compelled the respect of the world ; 
the adoption of an economic system developing antagonism 
between the manufacturing North and the cotton-growing South, 
at one time seriously threatening the Union, and the beginning of 
hostility to slavery which finally led to its extinction by civil war. 

At the beginning of the Revolution Josiah Quincy was too 
young to have intelligently observed what was passing about 
Boston between 1774 and 1776, if, during these years, there had 
not been found a more safe retreat for him at Norwich, Connecti- 
cut ; but from the adoption of the Constitution nothing of public 
interest escaped his notice. 

There was, however, one interesting event of which he may 
have had a vague recollection. It was the " tea party " of Decem- 
ber 16, 1773. In the afternoon of that day, his father, standing 
here in the Old South where I now standi and speaking to those 
who sat where you now sit, said in words that have become histori- 
cal : " It is not, Mr. Moderator, the spirit which vapors within these 
walls that must stand us in stead. The exertions of this day call 
forth events which will make a very different spirit necessary for 
our salvation" — words true now, and as applicable to affairs in 
this city today as they were more than a century ago when they 
reechoed from these walls. In the evening of that afternoon the 
infantile ears of his son must have heard, though they heeded not, 
the tramp of men hurrying past his father's door to gather in this 
place ; and they must have heard the war-whoop which came up 
out of the darkness of the street and was responded to by shouts 
from these dimly lighted galleries. Then Griffin's Wharf ; then 
the Boston Port Bill; then Lexington and Bunker Hill; then the 



Siege of Boston and the Declaration of Independence — events 
which he could have known only as we know them. 

Though Josiah Quincy doubtless knew Samuel Adams, it 
does not appear that he sought his society. Samuel Adams was 
much the older, and they were of different political parties. But 
with John Hancock, who married Dorothy Quincy, his father's 
cousin, he was better acquainted, and once at least was his guest 
in the old Hancock House, now unfortunately no longer stand- 
ing. Honor to the man, the President of this Society, who, 
with a just sense of the value of patriotic associations to good 
citizenship, did so much to save the Old South ! 

He knew Washington also, and so did Mrs. Quincy. Their 
estimates of the personality of that great man were widely differ- 
ent, she regarding him as "more than a hero — a superior being, 
as far above the common race of mankind in majesty and grace 
of personal bearing as in moral grandeur ; " and he, forsooth, 
as not unlike " the gentlemen who used to come to Boston in those 
days to attend the General Court from Hampden or Franklin 
County, in the western part of the State — a little stiff in his 
person, not a little formal in his manner, and not particularly at 
ease in the presence of strangers." In this difference of estimate 
we see one touch of nature which makes all married couples kin. 

I have given you a mere outline of Mr. Quincy's life. It was 
long, useful, honorable. In whatever field of labor he entered he 
soon became distinguished; but when, in May, 1823, in the second 
year of the city, Josiah Quincy became its Mayor, he found the 
place suited more than any other, I think, to his talents and his 
moral qualities ; and in the six years that he served the city he did 
the work which gave him his highest fame, and in the retrospect of 
a long and varied career, the most satisfaction. 

His new office certainly was less conspicuous as a theater 
of action than the floor of the House when filled by Randolph of 
Roanoke, Clay, Calhoun, Webster, and Macon ; and the proceed- 
ings of the city government attracted less attention, if any, in 
Europe or in this country, than national affairs from the Embargo 
of 1807 to the Peace of 1815. And when, in 1823, Josiah Quincy, 
in the prime of life and in the fullness of his great powers, reen- 
gaged in public affairs as the chief magistrate of a small city, it is 



not unlikely that his old associates at Washington, whom he had 
led in attack, and such as had felt the vigor of his onset, regarded 
the change of position as a descent. Even in this day of grace 
the mayoralty of a great city, which with its grand possibilities to 
all sincere men might well seem the summit of a career, is too often 
looked upon as a stepping-stone. 

On the other hand, when, in 1829, he became president of the 
oldest and most conspicuous college in the land, not unknown in 
Europe, it was doubtless thought that Mr. Quincy at length had 
reached a position more worthy of his great abilities and of his rich 
and varied culture. But it is a fair question whether, during the 
eight years he was in Congress, where, encountering Henry Clay 
without discomfiture, he delivered a series of speeches, in the 
judgment of Webster the best of that period, or during the sixteen 
years that he was president of the college and rescued it from 
financial peril, reformed its administration, and placed it on a firm 
basis, he did a work so peculiarly his own, or one so far beyond 
the powers of other men, or by which he desired or deserved to be 
remembered, as that of the six years that he was Mayor of Boston. 

Mr. Quincy, voluntarily retiring from Congress March 4, 18 13, 
never officially reengaged in national affairs, to the regret of his 
friends and, as his son suggests, possibly to his own in later years. 
I think we need not share that feeling. Doubtless with oppor- 
tunity he would have acquired great distinction, and possibly be 
more widely known today. We now see, however, that John Quincy 
Adams accomplished everything in diplomacy, or in national 
administration, that Mr. Quincy could have done, nor could Mr. 
Webster's senatorial career have been surpassed. But what other 
American known to history could have equaled Mr. Quincy's work 
in municipal affairs ; or who will presume to determine its relative 
importance to that of either of his great compeers ? 

I have no desire to magnify the subject assigned to me. 
Certainly I have none to overestimate the relative value of one 
period of service to any other of Mr. Quincy's life, and still 
less to the service of those who, from John Phillips to the present 
hour, have filled the Mayor's chair with honor. Boston has been 
fortunate in the selection of her chief magistrates ; but by any 
standard and by any comparison, Mr. Quincy's work as Mayor was 
a great work of enduring value, and his place is high up among 
able and useful men of his age and country. 



8 



I think we may safely go farther, and say that in the depart- 
ment of American municipal affairs no one of his countrymen ever 
had a wider, more profound, more permanent, or more beneficent 
influence than that of Josiah Quincy as Mayor of Boston. This 
was due in part, no doubt, to the fact that Boston was one of the 
earliest incorporated cities in the country, and perhaps the first 
to bring all departments of its government into that harmonious 
adjustment which made it a pattern for other cities in the United 
States, and, in certain particulars, for some in Europe. It is 
equally true that Josiah Quincy, like all men essentially great, rec- 
ognized the advantages of his position and made the most of them ; 
and so far as he made Boston what it was, and as widely and per- 
manently as it has influenced the institutions of other cities, so 
wide and permanent ought to be his just fame. Such was his 
opportunity. Then came his hour; and I think he made it an 
epoch in the history of municipal government. 

Who and what then was Josiah Quincy ; how did he equip 
himself for his work ; for what do his life, his character, and his 
services stand to us ? 

Here was a man in rare combination of birth, talents, personal 
accomplishments, and estate — the most enviable man of his day in 
America. That was his good fortune. It is ours, if we will make 
it so, that there was nothing in any or in all of the essential 
circumstances of his life, or his character, or conduct, which we 
cannot imitate, adopt, and follow. And it is just this imitable and 
exemplary quality which makes him, on the whole, the best model 
hitherto appearing in our American life upon which to form our- 
selves. The consummate genius of Henry Clay, who first aroused 
the spirit of nationality in the people, or of Webster, who molded 
the Constitution to it, or of Lincoln, who called a million of 
armed men to its defense, so far transcends the limits of ordinary 
rational aspiration as to make imitation ridiculous. Had Mr. 
Quincy belonged to that class of men, in despair we might 
turn off the lights, and, in the seclusion of our homes, giving 
rein to imagination, vainly identify ourselves with those rare 
spirits who have appeared to dazzle, to delight, and to elude 
us ! Happily for us, in what he did for good government, or in 
what his example may inspire us to do for good government, he 



was of a different order, though I think we shall quite as soon 
see another Henry Clay, or Daniel Webster, or possibly Abraham 
Lincoln, as another Josiah Quincy. Each in some particulars 
surpassed him. But in the genius of character — in the com- 
bination of intellectual and moral qualities — he has had no su- 
perior in our American life. And it is character which finally 
prevails ; which molds institutions and forms a people for great- 
ness ; which gathers to itself and expresses what is best and 
most permanent in race qualities. It is the dominating and per- 
manent influence on society. The stream finds its path, not by 
the lights which glitter along its course, nor by sun, moon or 
stars above, but by its headlands and firm-set shores. Our Puri- 
tans prevailed, not because of the intellectual greatness of one, 
but because many were great in character ; and so it must ever 
be. Great as were Mr. Quincy's abilities, his preeminence was in 
character. And it is this which draws us to the Old South tonight; 
not to search his life for entertaining anecdotes — of which there 
are many — or points effective in biographical description. With 
set purpose I shall pass over everything, however attractive, 
which is not profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, or 
for instruction in the righteousness of citizenship. I wish to 
discern in his life and character and services, if I may, whatever 
will instruct and inspire us to the formation of like character, 
to undertake similar services so far as our circumstances allow, 
and to act with the same fidelity to duty. Failing in this, I fail 
utterly. 

Mr. Quincy did not, like Franklin, raise himself from poverty to 
affluence and power ; but he was exposed to perils which Franklin 
escaped — perils which most of us escape ; perils of social position 
as the only son of an eminent revolutionary patriot enrolled by 
great services and early death among the martyrs ; of his singu- 
larly attractive personality — a fatal gift to one of less austere self- 
control ; of his fortune, permitting a life of elegant leisure elevated 
by no sincere purpose ; of a hereditary domain crowned by a 
historic mansion hospitable to illustrious visitors from other lands, 
as well as his own, including three Presidents of the United 
States — a social distinction satisfying to a moral sense less 
robust, less exacting than his own. How many have been wrecked 
by perils which Josiah Quincy avoided ; how few have acknowl- 



10 



edged the obligations he assumed ; how many have laid down the 
burdens he carried nearly a hundred years ; how many, withhold- 
ing, or in disgust withdrawing, themselves from public affairs for 
which they are eminently fitted, by education, fortune and social 
position, have yielded to the seductions of pleasures, not always 
innocent, and lived their lives, and exhausted their gifts, with no 
results of value to themselves or to others ! 

Franklin and Quincy were both great men ; and it is not their 
least — perhaps it is their highest — claim to grateful remembrance 
that each, pushing aside the obstacles and escaping the perils 
which beset him, made the most of his powers and opportunities. 
Higher honor no man ever gained than this ; than this of no man 
God requires more. Seldom has the same town produced two 
such men, each recognized as the best type of some characteristic 
trait of its people — Franklin of their thrift, the result of right 
conduct ; Josiah Quincy of their fitness for citizenship, which for 
two hundred years, in peace and in war, had made Boston a most 
conspicuous and influential municipality; himself to become more 
widely known as the rights and duties of citizenship are accorded 
their just place in the education and life of the people, as they 
must inevitably be with the development of republican govern- 
ment. 

Mr. Quincy's talents were great, so great that more safely 
than most men he could have dispensed with laborious preparation 
for his public work; but, save John Adams and his son, John 
Quincy, I know no one of • our countrymen who so assiduously 
prepared for it. From early manhood he fitted himself for citizen- 
ship with very clear notions of its value and just demands; and 
he cultivated his powers by an exhaustive study of every question 
likely to engage them. 

Although completely equipped for office, Josiah Quincy, so 
far as I can discover, never sought it; nor, what is quite as much 
to his credit considering his easy fortune, did he ever refuse it. 
I think we may safely say that he never accepted office for its 
honors or its emoluments, nor declined it to escape its labors, 
its responsibilities, or even its obloquy. When he accepted the 
mayoralty it was not that he might make himself famous, but, as 
he hoped, that he might make the city eminent for good order, 



II 



for honest government, and for the prosperity of its people — 

make it 

" Athens the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
And eloquence, native to famous wits 
m Or hospitable ; " 

nor did it change his determination or his conduct by a hair's 
breadth when he foresaw, as he did from the beginning, that after 
such services the people would reject him. 

I am now to give some account of the services which enroll 
Josiah Quincy as " the Great Mayor " among chief magistrates of 
the city. He succeeded John Phillips in May, 1823, and held the 
office six years. As the history of his administration is in some 
sort a " Tract for the Times," I desire to preface it by recalling to 
your recollection the state of municipal affairs in Boston in 1821, 
at the time the people were discussing their fundamental govern- 
ment — whether it should remain, as for two hundred years it had 
been, essentially democratic, or be changed more completely to a 
representative government. An interesting question not only in 
Boston but elsewhere ; for about the time when Mr. Quincy was 
giving attention to the subject, Guizot, who had been of the min- 
istry of Louis XVIII, in which he took an active part in the estab- 
lishment of representative government in France, was preparing a 
course of lectures, afterwards expanded and published, in 1852, 
as "The History of the Origin of Representative Government in 
Europe." Guizot believed in representative government, and yet 
when he published that work he had witnessed the bad fortune of 
the experiment in France in 1820, the severer test of it in 1830, 
and its disastrous failure when Louis Napoleon seized the govern- 
ment in 185 1. Nevertheless his faith endured, and in the wreck 
of hopes and reasonable expectations, with sublime serenity, he 
said that " among the infinite illusions of human vanity we must 
number those of misfortune ; whether as peoples or individuals, in 
public or in private life, we delight to persuade ourselves that our 
trials are unprecedented, and that we have to endure evils and 
surmount obstacles previously unheard of. How deceitful is this 
consolation of pride in suffering ! God has made the condition of 
men, of all men, more severe than they are willing to believe ; and 
he causes them at all times to purchase at a dearer price than they 
had anticipated the success of their labors and the progress of 



12 



their destiny. Let us accept this stern law without a murmur; 
let us courageously pay the price which God puts upon success, 
instead of basely renouncing success itself." 

It hightens our respect for Mr. Quincy that, though he was 
opposed to a city charter and resisted it by speech and pen as long 
as th^re was any chance of defeating it, yet, when adopted, with 
sincerity and untiring labor he devoted his powers and his time to 
make it successful. 

Like some other able men of his day, he believed the pure 
democracy of the town meeting more suited to the character of 
the people of New England and less liable to corruption and abuse 
than a more compact government, which, with all its checks and 
balances, checks after the collision and balances after the load is 
overturned quite as often as before — a system which breeds con- 
fidential clerks and swells the population of Montreal — a sort of 
" Waterbury watch " affair, out of which you get no more time than 
you put into it ! 

After nearly seventy years of representative city government 
it is premature to say what form it will ultimately take ; whether it 
will return to the old democratic simplicity, if some practicable 
scheme can be devised, or still further simplify representation by 
abolishing all intermediaries, such as the Board of Aldermen and 
Common Council, and, intrusting everything to the Mayor, with 
such heads of departments as he may choose, hold him responsible 
for good government. This has one advantage of a monarchy. 
If the people dislike the monarch they can decapitate him, as they 
often have done ; with representative bodies this is not quite so 
convenient, though often quite as desirable and necessary ! 

It took six thousand years to ascertain whether, by just law, 
the sun should revolve around the earth as a center, or the earth 
around the sun. Copernicus settled that question ; and we await 
the advent of an equal genius to adjust the revolution of political 
bodies agreeably to the divine order. In the meantime we must wait, 
but not idly. As we ourselves have to do, so did Mr. Quincy take 
things as he found them — not altogether as he would have chosen. 
When he came to the government he found matters much as they are 
now. Then there were proportionally as many who pleaded, as we 
do, in excuse for declining participation in public affairs, "that their 
opinions, tastes, and what seemed to them right modes of action, 
were so different from those of a large part of the people and so 



13 

unlikely to result in success that it was hardly worth while to 
waste their energies in the vain endeavor to secure good govern- 
ment; that matters were in a bad way doubtless, but that they 
could better bear the ills of bad government than afford the time 
required for their correction ; that a few right-minded people were 
of small account among so many wrong-minded, and at worst that 
they were as well off as others." Mr. Quincy had quite as good 
reason as we have for impatience, discouragement, and disgust 
with popular ignorance, unreasonableness, and caprice, with the 
greed of the selfish and the indifference of well-to-do people. 

The change from the old town government to a city govern- 
ment, requiring a surrender of methods dear to the people by 
immemorial usage and the adoption of new methods necessarily 
abridging many of their former liberties, caused discontent, which 
increased rather than diminished after their first year's experience 
of the new system. For two hundred years the town government 
had performed its functions, upon the whole, with results satisfac- 
tory to the people. It was their own — to them a great merit ; for 
in it they made their power felt without much dilution by passing 
through a representative medium. It was economical — another 
merit ; for the people were economical. They treated the unfort- 
unate and vicious classes with slight regard to health, comfort, or 
their possible restoration to better conditions. Streets were nar- 
row, ill paved, unswept, and drainage disgracefully inadequate ; but 
wide streets, well paved, well lighted, and well drained were costly 
luxuries, to be had only by taxation. They had rebelled against 
British taxation, and quarreled with the domestic article. They dis- 
liked the thing, by whatever name. Consequently their legislation 
was from hand to mouth, with little regard to system, or prevision 
of remote consequences, good or bad. 

This was a serious embarrassment to Mr. Quincy, whose broad 
and forecasting mind projected measures requiring time for their 
perfection and for yielding their best results. Of course the people 
were not unaware of the impracticability of 7,000 voters assembling 
in one place, usually Faneuil Hall, to choose town officers, levy 
taxes, and determine with due deliberation the various and com- 
plicated legislative and executive affairs for a population of 40,000 ; 
and, as we shall see, they had delegated some of their more 
important functions to executive boards. Nevertheless, five times 



14 

between 1784 and 1821 they had refused a charter, and finally 
accepted it only by a majority of 1,500 of the 5,000 voters who 
took the trouble to express their wishes at the polls. 

The government had changed, but the people remained the 
same. Old habits were strong. They missed their March meet- 
ing — a sort of festival day on which they had assembled in Faneuil 
Hall, chosen town officers, and done their town business, as had 
their' fathers for two hundred years, and outside exchanged friendly 
greetings and the news, and now and then made sharp bargains. 
For the young were frolic and sport and gingerbread and fire-crack- 
ers, dear to boys. How different from all this were cold, isolated 
ward rooms, with no debates and no James Otis, or Samuel 
Adams, or Harrison Gray Otis, the most brilliant of orators until 
Wendell Phillips arose in Faneuil Hall to electrify the peninsula 
and recall the austere virtues of the Puritans. 

Nor was sentimental attachment wanting. The town meeting 
had endeared itself to the people in affording opportunities for 
resisting every form of royal predominance, civil or ecclesiastical, 
which interfered with their rights, real or imaginary, and by its 
agency in bringing on and carrying forward the Revolution. 
Some of the older men had seen how effectively, how wisely, 
Samuel Adams had handled it, and generally, though not always, 
how unselfishly. It had been the palladium of their liberties, and 
they were sorry to give it up. 

Now these principles, reasons, and prejudices, although shared 
by Josiah Quincy, were a serious hindrance to his government, 
into which they were carried by the people, and made themselves 
more and more manifest as the stringency of new rules interfered 
with old customs and interests. There was laudation of old ways, 
and much carping at the new, chiefly because they were new. 

From a very early day many legislative and executive powers 
of the town government had been given over to Selectmen, Over- 
seers of the Poor, Board of Health, Firewards, and Assessors ; and 
it came to pass that the first three of these boards constituted a 
Finance Committee, which determined appropriations, assessment 
of taxes, and expenditures. Although they owed their election, 
and nominally their powers, to the people, practically they were 
self-perpetuuting oligarchies, which claimed to carry their functions 
into the new city government in 1822, and were only suppressed by 



15 

the tact and persistence of Mr. Quincy in asserting the just author- 
ity of the new government under the charter. 

When Mr. Quincy became Mayor the new government had 
been running a year. The first Mayor, an able and worthy gentle- 
man, does not appear to have given much attention to municipal 
affairs ; and other public burdens, with failing health, prevented 
his grappling with troublesome questions. He left them with Mr. 
Quincy. The charter, as drafted by the late Chief Justice Shaw, 
was a model. But paper government was one thing, and a work- 
ing government was quite another thing — a machine needing 
adjustment. This was no easy matter. An indolent, easy-going 
Mayor, to whom conscience was of less account than comfort, 
caring less to have matters run correctly than smoothly, and more 
solicitous respecting his reelection than for the public interests, 
would have got on with a tithe of the trouble which Mr. Quincy 
took to himself. 

In everything relating to the construction or working of the 
charter, and to the management of city affairs, he had a way of his 
own. He studied subjects until he knew them better than any 
other man. Of this, I dare say, he was conscious, and perhaps he 
was opinionated. Nevertheless, he was a just man, judicially just, 
determined, inflexible, steadfast. Nothing escaped his eye, and in 
labor he was untiring. 

Here was the right man for the place, yet very much in the 
way — in the way of all wrong-headed people ; of those whose 
private interests conflicted with the public interests ; of all who 
had jobs ; of all who wished to be left alone in pursuit of their 
selfish courses or passions, regardless of the general weal. 

In giving an account of the new Mayor's work I cannot go 
very fully into details ; but in general terms, and with due regard 
to facts, I think I may say that there was no one of our public 
institutions, nor anything in the mode of conducting them, which 
gave rank to Boston among cities quite out of proportion to its ' 
territory or population, and made it a model for other cities, which 
either did not originate in the inventive mind of Josiah Quincy, or 
owe to his shaping hand completer development and more benefi- 
cent action. His work covered public morals, health, education, 
convenience, and comfort; streets, sewers, and water; penal, 
reformatory, and industrial institutions ; markets, police, fire 



i6 



department, and an incipient public garden. With efficient coad- 
jutors and, in a general sense, the public support, yet he was the 
greatest factor in every work. He inspired, he led. Before his 
time mayors were often merely presiding officers — ornamental 
figure-heads. Executive powers had fallen into the hands of 
boards. Lack of unity and efficiency followed. Mr. Quincy deter- 
mined to be Mayor. Therefore he gathered up all the powers 
which the charter, in express terms or by fair construction, gave 
him, and he used them with results before unknown ; not to 
engross power, but, as he said, "to produce and fix in the minds 
of all influential classes of citizens a strong conviction of the 
advantages of having an active and willingly responsible executive, 
by an actual experience of the benefits of such an administration 
of their affairs ; and also of their right and duty of holding the 
Mayor responsible in character and office for the state of the police 
and finances of the city." 

Such were Mr. Quincy's views respecting good government. 
To bring it about taxed his powers to the utmost. He succeeded, 
and his success was the best solution of the problem of city 
government hitherto presented. The sequel is worth noting. 
After he left the mayoralty, in 1829, there set in a departure from 
his views, which finally became wide. Old jealousies between the 
different departments of government Tevived. The legislative 
branch claimed a share in the powers of the executive depart- 
ment, and both in those of the Mayor. The General Court 
yielded to the clamor for popular rights; and after a time we came 
to have a government which, lacking unity of power and conse- 
quent responsibility, did not govern. Matters finally came to such 
a pass that, in 1885, the Legislature again intervened and remod- 
eled the charter so as to act more nearly in the spirit in which Mr. 
Quincy administered it sixty years before. 

When Mr. Quincy had established the government on a good 
basis, he instituted a series of reforms, more than a score in num- 
ber, which gave to Boston a high rank among municipalities, and 
made it in many respects a model city ; a model of institutions for 
the criminal, the improvident, and the unfortunate ; of well-paved, 
clean-kept, and well-lighted streets ; of sewerage and systematic 
removal of public and private offal ; of administrative measures 



17 

concerning public health, education, police, and markets; of the 
preservation of natural scenery, such as the islands in the harbor, 
and for the inauguration of a park system, now unfolding itself with 
promise to public health and morals and the sense of beauty. 

Without order of time, and grouping some related measures, 
I now specify a few of Mr. Quincy's services. If today, or at any 
time before today, Boston has or has had the reputation of being 
one of the cleanest and most healthy of large cities, it is due mainly 
to Josiah Quincy. He took the matter in hand soon after his 
inauguration — and there was need. Conflicting boards claimed 
sole authority to clean the streets and remove offal. Consequently 
the work was not well done. The powers inefficiently exercised 
by these boards were transferred by legislative authority and 
municipal consent to the Mayor and Aldermen, who got to work 
with such effect that " for the first time, on any scale destined for 
universal application, the broom was used upon the streets ; every 
street, alley, court, and household yard, however distant and how- 
ever obscure, was thoroughly cleansed." The death rate was 
lessened and the comfort of the people increased. 

With like vigor, and with similar discouragements, Mr. 
Quincy overhauled criminal and pauper institutions. There was 
an almshouse in the heart of the city. Its inmates, allowed to 
wander through the streets, some intoxicated, some begging, had 
become a public nuisance. For nearly a hundred years their care 
had been intrusted to the Overseers of the Poor, excellent gentle- 
men, with old-time notions of their powers as well as of the 
management of paupers. With this board he had a contest. He 
won ; and, as a result, there were set up on spacious grounds at 
South Boston, amidst healthful influences, a House of Correction, 
a House of Industr}^ and a House for the Reformation of Juvenile 
Offenders. This change, salutary to their inmates, promoted the 
security and comfort of dwellers in the city proper. Several of 
these institutions have since been removed to Deer Island, and 
that for the Reformation of Juvenile Offenders, which originated 
with Mr. Quincy, attracted the attention of De Tocqueville, sent 
by the French government in 1832 to inquire into the penitentiary 
system of the United States. 

Before Mr. Quincy's time some of the leading religious socie- 
ties had derived considerable revenue from the sale of burial rights 



i8 



in tombs beneath their church edifices. Respectable medical prac- 
titioners said there was no harm in this ; but Mr. Quincy effect- 
ually opposed its continuance on the score of public health, and 
this led to the establishment of extra-mural cemeteries, now so 
common, of which Mt. Auburn was the first. 

Public morals, no less than public health, engaged his atten- 
tion. There was a district of the city, now quite respectable, then 
congested with jail-birds, thieves, miscreants, and the most aban- 
doned of both sexes, who haunted houses of ill-fame, and, issuing 
therefrom, committed all sorts of crimes, including murder, and in 
their Boston Alsatia defied the police. Mr. Quincy took them in 
hand, and shortly the worst offenders were in the House of Correc- 
tion at South Boston. The district was restored to good order 
and respectability, and the city became more secure. 

Mr. Quincy's work appears at its best only in the fullest 
details, though time does not allow their recital. Nothing within 
municipal authority escaped his attention ; there was no depart- 
ment which, after his six years of service, did not show the effect 
of masterly organization and administration. There are two sub- 
jects, however, which even in a cursory survey of Mr. Quincy's 
labors ought not to be overlooked. 

Every one knows, generally at least, that Boston owes to 
Josiah Quincy what is now best known as Quincy Market ; but 
unless he has studied the subject, no one knows the change 
effected in that section of the city, or the labor by which private 
interests were satisfied and the people induced to engage in a 
work so expensive, which yet resulted in the erection of " a granite 
market house, two stories high, four hundred and thirty-five feet 
long, fifty feet wide, and covering 27,000 feet of land, includ- 
ing every essential accommodation, at the cost of one hun- 
dred and fifty thousand dollars. Six new streets were opened 
and a seventh greatly enlarged, including 167,000 square feet of 
land, and flats, docks, and wharf rights'were obtained of the extent 
of 142,000 square feet; and all this was accomplished in the center 
of a populous city, not only without tax, debt, or burdens upon its 
pecuniary resources, notwithstanding in the course of its opera- 
tions funds to the amount of upwards of ^1,100,000 had been 
employed, but with large permanent addition to its real and pro- 
ductive property." 



19 

It is perhaps less well known that Mr. Quincy extinguished 
private rights to lands at the foot of the Common, since become part 
of the Public Garden, which secured what was then one of the most 
repulsive, now one of the most beautiful, spots in the world, and 
made practicable the policy of the State in laying out and filling 
up the Back Bay and opening public squares, for which the people 
were not then prepared. 

It has been often said by some who were citizens of Boston 
during Mr. Quincy's administration, that the trait of his character 
which most strongly impressed them, as exhibited on many occa- 
sions, was courage, and that he might well be best remembered 
still as " the Fearless Magistrate." There was one occasion on 
which he gave an example of moral courage which even in this 
sketch ought not to be passed over. It was in respect to the fire 
department. This organization held an important relation to the 
property and the lives of the people. Numbering twelve hundred 
young men, bound together by common associations and common 
dangers, impatient of new ways and jealous of any infringement on 
their customary privileges, they were a power at the polls quite out 
of proportion to their numbers — a power which they were not slow 
to exert on occasion. Mr. Quincy's efforts in reducing the depart- 
ment to stricter discipline, and even more, his insistence upon the 
use of hose instead of buckets, and cisterns instead of pumps, and 
his bringing from Philadelphia and New York new and improved 
fire engines, had caused ill feeling which showed itself in insubor- 
dination and acts of violence. This state of things prepared the 
way for an outbreak in the last year of Mr. Quincy's administration 
on the appointment of a chief engineer not to the firemen's liking. 
Mr. Quincy's resoluteness in meeting this exigency, and the prompt- 
itude and efficiency with which he filled the places of those who 
expected to force the Mayor's position by tendering their resigna- 
tion, showed the people how fearlessly he could discharge his duty 
even at the cost of his reelection, as he foresaw might be and was 
the case. 

In estimating " the Great Mayor," it is not enough to look 
merely at the amount and variety of his services. Though his 
intellect was of a high order, his influence was largely in character, 



20 



devotion to his work, untiring industry, sincerity, decision of man- 
ner tempered by exactest courtesy, cordiality, helpfulness, physical 
and moral intrepidity. Some of us saw him in his old age, the 
most venerable figure in our streets ; others, at the college before 
time had bowed his form ; but the memory of few now present 
reaches back to the days when, in the prime of his long life — with 
his high-bred face no more noticeable man in America* — often 
before the sun was up, he rode his daily round of inspecting the 
city ; or when, in a riot, he put himself at the head of the truck- 
men, hastily extemporized as an auxiliary police force, and moved 
down upon the mob. In every relation of life, public or private, 
his character, bearing, and personality gave assurance of a man. 
Such qualities impressed institutions as well as society. 

To found a city, or to establish institutions and indelibly 
stamp them by character and services, has ever been held a great 
achievement. When Themistocles, the Athenian, would boast, he 
said that he "could make a small town a great city." Mr. Quincy 
never boasted, though he was not unconscious of his great powers, 
nor that he had wrought into the fabric and texture of the city 
what would survive the fashions of municipal government. Since 
his time changes have taken place, and others will doubtless 
follow ; but neither the work nor the fame of Josiah Quincy 
can ever perish. They are on the rock. His mayoralty was 
great in economic and material results — promoted cleanliness, 
order, comfort ; but was even greater, I think, in its successful 
endeavor after public virtue, purity, and social right. 

In the lowest and least complete estimate of his services Mr. 
Quincy earned the respect of his constituents and the benediction 
of later generations; but the former rejected him and we are in 
danger of forgetting him. This ought not so to be, more for our own 
sake than for his. After he had filled the ofBce of Mayor for six 



*The likeness facing the title-page is from a portrait painted by Stuart when Mr. 
Quincy was Mayor, and is one of the four of him in oil which remain. But in none of 
them can we see him as he appeared on taking his degree, in peach-colored coat, 
white satin small-clothes with silk stockings, and powdered hair; nor in the splendid 
uniform of the " Huzzars." Page painted him in his robes as President of the 
University, and Story made a model of a statue which, though regarded as one of his 
best works, has never been put into marble. There are also portrait busts of him by 
Greenough and Crawford. 



21 



years with assiduity and success unparalleled, the people, in spite 
of these services and partly because of them, refused to reelect him. 

What then ? Did all his great services go for nothing ? Was 
self-respect clouded or honor lost ? The citadel of self-respect is 
unassailable from without, nor is honor the gift of the people. 
They can neither bestow it nor withhold it. It inheres in con- 
duct and in character, is not gained save by honest endeavor, nor 
lost save by misconduct. It was Washington's in the successes 
of Trenton and Princeton, and no less his in the defeats of Brandy- 
wine and Germantown ; his when Gates and Conway, Mifflin and 
Samuel Adams, I am sorry to say, would have deposed him ; 
and his, no less and no more, when kings and princes and people 
in remote lands and later ages pronounced him greatest among 
men. No — nothing is so honorable as honor unjustly withheld, 
no praise so acclaiming as the silence of lips that should speak, 
no victory so victorious as defeat in just cause. For when men 
were silent and their eyes averted, as Josiah Quincy stepped down 
from the Mayor's chair in 1829, public health and security spake ; 
and so did beneficent institutions ; and so spake the New Faneuil 
Hall Market, and spacious warehouses, and broad, well-paved 
streets ; yea, and the very stones of those streets, and the virtuous 
poor who owed to him comforts before denied, and youth reclaimed 
from vicious ways, and just men and women looked on him with 
kindly eyes, and with according voices proclaimed honor to whom 
honor unjustly withheld was due ; and he has taken his place 
among those dear to God, who serve their fellow-men without 
expectation of reward. 

But what is all this to men of limited capacities and common- 
place opportunities — to us members of the Society for Promot- 
ing Good Citizenship, who have neither high aspirations nor 
special fitness for public affairs ? Rightly considered, it is every- 
thing ; it is incitement, endeavor, success, or consolation. I have 
said that among great men Mr. Quincy was exceptionally rare in 
this : that his character, his conduct, and his services are imitable. 
There is no one in this audience, however low in fortune or social 
position, none however high, that may not wisely form himself 
on Josiah Quincy's character and imitate his conduct ; and if we 
lack his opportunities, at least we may remember that before he 



22 



was the great Mayor he was the great Citizen ; and before he 
was the great Citizen he was a good citizen — as any one of us 
may be ! 

His political ethics were simple, easily adopted, and of uni- 
versal concern. He believed in the duties of the citizen ; that 
peril to the republic or to the city or to civilization is less from the 
intrusion of the lower classes into public affairs than from the 
withdrawal of the wealthy, educated, and refined class ; less from 
the spoliations of the proletariat than from the indifference of the 
wealthy and educated ; and he regarded as less obnoxious to just 
censure him who takes on the duties of the citizen for private ends 
than one who abstains for merely personal convenience. 

I do not think Mr. Quincy found all his work congenial. 
That such a man — a man who understood and enjoyed the best 
of the world's literature, who loved agriculture and the society of 
refined men and women — should busy himself, forsooth, with 
drains and cesspools; with back yards and crowded ' tenements ; 
with criminals, and the poor, and the squalid, and the sick. This 
certainly could not have been altogether attractive to Mr, Quincy, 
a born aristocrat, who could run his lineage back to the rolls of 
Battle Abbey without encountering the gallows or losing himself 
in a felon's cell ; a man who made no profession of democracy ; 
who would have weighed votes rather than have counted them ; 
who preferred the judgments of experts to the unformed opinions 
of the crowd; who sought the society of gentlemen rather than 
that of 'longshoremen. Nevertheless, where he was called, there 
he was to be found ! 

Though not a believer in the democracy of party, it is by no 
means certain that he would have approved of recent legislative 
acts which seem to regard the Great and General Court, rather 
than the people, as the true fountain of municipal government 
under the constitution. I doubt if he ever contemplated, as a 
practical relief from bad government, any departure from that faith 
on which our political system rests — faith in the ability and the de- 
sire of the people to govern themselves wisely, honestly, efficiently, 

I think Mr. Quincy saw, what all of us must see, that the 
people, acting without some unifying principle and purpose, are as 
the sand clouds of the desert, driven blindly and blinding; but 



23 

when, as in the late civil war, they are animated and guided by 
beneficent purpose, though like the sea sometimes turbulent, they 
are wiser even in their anger than any man however wise, or any 
number of men less than the whole. 

Nothing concerns the people so much as government. It is 
the test of public morals, as the regulation of life is the test of 
private morals. Deprecate it as we may, quarrel with it if we will, 
nevertheless the world's judgment of us as a people by the prac- 
tical results of our government, whether national, state, or muni- 
cipal, is fair, and from that judgment there is no appeal. Mr. 
Quincy, therefore, made it a constant purpose of his life to present 
good government to the people as the highest end of civil society ; 
to endue them with a unifying sense of its value,and to inspire 
them with the desire and determination of making themselves fit 
to take it up, carry it forward, and transmit it to their successors. 
He would spare no expense to educate them ; would withhold no 
warning voice calling them to duty or impressing them with the 
conviction that expedients must be temporary and in the long run 
unsuccessful, and that, after all makeshifts have failed, none but 
the people will, or can, correct what is wrong or secure what is 
desirable in their government. 

Josiah Quincy was not of the people, but with the people and 
for the people — always ! If he never indulged in the illusions of 
hope respecting the perfectibility of popular government, he never 
indulged in the illusions of despair. His participation in govern- 
ment, as a private citizen or as a public officer, was part of his 
religion ; not a new religion, but older than Sinai, and finding one 
sanction, at least, in the necessities of civilization. It needs dis- 
ciples and, it may be, its martyrs. 

Thus lived and died and was buried the first citizen of no mean 
city. Some of his fellow-citizens equaled him in genius, some in 
learning, and some in fidelity to duty ; but in the combination 
of these qualities he had no superior and few equals. Mr. Quincy's 
death, though on account of his great age not unexpected, pro- 
duced deep feeling among all classes of his fellow-citizens, and was 
followed by expressions of grief from every part of the country, 
and even from foreign lands. When he died a conspicuous per- 



24 

sonality was withdrawn from human view ; but his life and char- 
acter and influence remain. They have passed into the life of the 
city for which he did so much ; a character which, as it becomes 
better known, may we not hope, will be accepted as the type for 
those who owe it to their ancestry to be great in affairs, capable of 
self-government, free, patriotic, and beneficent in all public rela- 
tions. In honorable place among those who have founded cities, 
reformed institutions, and served God by unselfishly serving their 
fellow-men, is the name of Josiah Quincy, " the Great Mayor," 



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